Jorge Garcia of 'Lost' on being the face of Weezer's new album: 'How awesome is that!'

Earlier this week, Lost fans roared with “Raditude” when they heard the news those impish pop-rockers in Weezer were going to call their new album Hurley and put Jorge Garcia’s warm and fuzzy mug on the cover. (Note: “Raditude” is the name of Weezer’s last album.) But of course, no one was more tickled by this news than Jorge Garcia himself. “How awesome is that! It totally put a smile on my face, to say the least,” the actor tells EW.com. “It ranks right up there with getting my own action figure.” (For the record, Garcia is indeed a Weezer fan. Favorite song? “I’m a huge fan of the opening riff of ‘Hash Pipe’,” says Garcia. “It’s like the theme song to Peter Gunn times 1000.”)

Here’s the backstory on how Garcia found himself becoming Weezer’s cover boy. The actor says he met Rivers Cuomo backstage at The George Lopez Show on May 12 while doing press for Lost. They talked for a bit, and then Cuomo asked Garcia if he could get a photo taken with him. “And then two months later,’ says the actor, “I get an email from my manager saying, ‘Listen, Weezer contacted us and they want you to be on the cover of their new CD.” Garcia was then shown what he thought was a rough draft mock-up of the cover using the photo he took with Cuomo, albeit blown up and cropped to showcase just Garcia’s face. “But it wasn’t a mock-up. They wanted to use that specific photo,” says Garcia. “I thought that was really cool.”

Asked what he was thinking and feeling in the moment that’s captured in the photo, Garcia says: “It was just surreal. It’s always surreal when people come up to you and tell you that they’re fans of the show. So it was really kinda cool that in this case it was Rivers, because I had listened to his songs for so many years. It was just so surprising. And then it was over before I knew it.”

Garcia says he hasn’t heard any of the songs on Hurley, which according to Rolling Stone has a 1960s pop rock vibe. He hopes to get a sneak listen of the disc before the album’s release on September 15. He also hopes it will be successful enough to go gold or platinum and merit “one of those special award versions of the record that they give you when you sell a bunch of copies. Because I want one! I really want one to hang on my wall with the rest of my Lost stuff.”

FYI, according to AltPress, here’s the track list for Hurley. I look forward to mining all of them for Lost theories–especially No. 5.